The shake of his fists — that’s what it was. Joey Jones only wanted to show he was doing his best but, unbeknown to him, he was creating a legacy.
You only had to look at clips of him thundering down the left to understand what made him part of a team that conquered Europe twice. You only had to speak with him for a few minutes to appreciate why he was universally adored by those with whom he shared a dressing room.
Jones, you see, played football with the same enthusiasm as those who came to watch him for Wrexham and Liverpool, for Chelsea and Huddersfield and for Wales, who capped him 72 times. He was blessed with rare gifts but knew how blessed he was to have a rare opportunity.
‘I was very lucky not to be sent away to (an institute) for young offenders at one stage because of some of the things I got up to back home,’ he once said. ‘We weren’t robbers or nothing like that, we’d just have punch-ups! I didn’t need drink to get me going. I was nuts anyway.’
So after those lung-bursting surges or those challenges that could have stopped a tank in its tracks, Jones would shake his fists to the Kop as a sign he was doing it all for them. So popular was the gesture, a connection between pitch and terrace, it followed him long into retirement.
‘I get embarrassed really,’ he once told LFChistory.net. ‘Why did they like me? It’s not going to be because of my football skills, is it! All I could do was give 150 per cent for them, not 100 per cent.
‘But it’s nice to be remembered for something. I’ve never professed to be anybody I wasn’t.’
That’s what set him apart. Jones, who died aged 70 on Tuesday after a battle with illness, was the boy who grew up in a council flat in Llandudno where he had pictures of Liverpool players on his wall. One day he was idolising them from afar, the next he was training with them at Melwood.
Jones, who signed for Liverpool in July 1975, became so popular during three seasons at Anfield that before their first European Cup final, a particularly witty banner was unfurled in recognition of him.
‘Joey ate the frogs legs and made the Swiss roll,’ it proclaimed, to acknowledge defeats of Saint-Etienne and FC Zurich. ‘Now he’s munching Gladbach.’
‘It doesn’t matter if it’s Liverpool fans, Manchester United fans or whatever — they all remember the banner,’ said Jones. ‘It was the ultimate compliment, really. They made a banner like that for me? That meant everything.’
So humbled was he by the gesture, Jones kept the banner at his home in north Wales — the area he loved so much he could never move away, not even when Chelsea signed him in 1982. He and Mickey Thomas, his best friend, would either commute to London on a daily basis or, occasionally, sleep in the fitness room.
Most people wouldn’t last three months doing that but Jones did the journey for three years, helping Chelsea win the Second Division in 1984. Thomas, who stayed by his side throughout, described himself as being ‘heartbroken’ that ‘Sir Joey has left us’.
The grief and emptiness is felt far and wide. You could not fail to be swept up in Jones’s enthusiasm. To listen to him talk about games in which Wales had beaten England at the Racecourse Ground gave you shivers.
Jones played in 1980, four days after England had beaten reigning world champions Argentina at Wembley, when Mike England’s side obliterated their neighbours 4-1, and again in 1984 when a Mark Hughes goal settled the contest. ‘The best way to describe the game was a 1-0 hiding,’ Jones told me, chuckling down the phone. ‘I’ll tell you now, the celebrations were something else!’
There will, in time, be a celebration of his life and rightly so. Jones, known as ‘Mr Wrexham’, made the first of 479 appearances for the club against Chester in 1973, with his last coming in 1992.
He will be commemorated with a statue outside the Racecourse Ground. It will ensure, just like his shaking fists and that banner, that he will never be forgotten.
